Greatest Generation's spirit may be coming back, as reflected in marathons

No threat of terrorism could dampen the spirit of runners on Allentown’s… (Harry Fisher, THE MORNING…)

April 30, 2013|Paul Carpenter

There was nothing tangible that made what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" great. It was just an unidentifiable spirit.

I may be wrong, but I think I see signs of that spirit coming back.

The St. Luke's Half Marathon, with a 13.1-mile course through Allentown's splendid park system, came just 13 days after terrorist bombs shattered the gusto of the world's most prestigious footrace, the Boston Marathon.

Kari Braido of Easton ran in the Boston Marathon and heard and felt the blasts, it was reported Monday by Gary Blockus in The Morning Call.

"We're not going to let them win," he quoted her as saying at the Allentown event. "It [the terrorist attack] made me want to do Boston 2014 even more."

"We can't let other people think they can break us," Chrissy Ribble of Delaware County told Blockus. She also ran at Boston and was at the finish line when the bombs went off.

The story said firefighters Jeff Lecompte of Reading and Bob Simons of Bethlehem ran the entire race in full firefighting regalia and carried American and Boston flags — as the crowd chanted, "USA, USA."

As one of the world's oldest journalists, I have childhood memories of World War II, and I was born in the Great Depression, the two moments in history that Brokaw said defined The Greatest Generation.

My father was married and had a child, so he did not have to go in the service, but he did, as did some of my uncles. The first song I ever learned, as a preschooler, was "There's a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere," and by the time I was in the second grade, living in San Diego, my friends and I could identify the silhouette of every warplane, American or Japanese.

Mostly, I remember the spirit that people exhibited in those days. It was something America totally lost, it seemed to me, by the end of the Vietnam War.

There were signs of it after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and after heroic passengers on United Flight 93 prevented the final attack. Many people, however, were justifiably skeptical when America went after Iraq, which had virtually nothing to do with the attacks, instead of Saudi Arabia, where the oil sheiks had close ties to top U.S. officials.

Can you imagine The Greatest Generation performing the way it did if its government let the Axis off the hook after Pearl Harbor because of business ties?

Now, in people like Braido, Ribble, Lecompte and Simons, I sense that Americans are once again ready to pull together.

Today's main global conflict is especially difficult because it's viewed by our adversaries as a holy war. When the followers of the fanatic fringes of a religion are told that God wants them to do something, they can be persuaded to do anything.

Three days before the St. Luke's Half Marathon, Blockus had another story, saying the Allentown police would be "on heightened alert this weekend" and the headline said to "expect increased security."

Because of another part of my ancient background (I experienced truly intense security when I was in the military and worked on nuclear weapons), I have grave doubts about the effectiveness of "security" measures when it comes to terrorism.

Now is the time to use our heads and try to learn something from our painful experience in Vietnam. A chief architect of that war was then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a brilliant man who later made what I think is the most accurate analysis of our failure there.

"We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values," McNamara said a few years before he died, saying it's essential to have "empathy" for an enemy, to understand what an enemy's motives are, no matter how bitter the conflict may be.

Our war with the religious fanatics who now target America is not the same, but the need for empathy is. Terrorists do what they do for reasons. They have goals and the way to deter them is to figure out what those goals are and make sure that every act of terrorism brings a ferocious reaction on our part aimed at executing the reverse.

Today's terrorists have two basic goals — to increase the power of tyrants who seek to impose dogmatic religious beliefs on others by force, and to do whatever they can to diminish the one thing they detest the most — individual freedom. If America is to deter terrorism, it will not succeed with "security" measures or laws that reduce freedom, and it will not make terrorists mend their ways by propping up the world's most oppressive tyranny, Saudi Arabia.

That is why this old geezer was so heartened by the attitudes expressed in connection with the St. Luke's Half Marathon in Allentown. We are not going to shrink from your threats by retreating behind barriers of security in Allentown, Boston or anywhere else. Do your worst and it will only bolster our resolve to make sure it does not work for you any better than Pearl Harbor worked for the Axis.

The more you try to inflict murder and fear, the more we're going to make sure that the result of your demented actions will be the opposite of what you want.

That spirit is in our blood, and it seems to be manifesting itself once again.